teaching
My usual teaching rotation typically includes Reasoning (Philosophy 101) and courses in logic, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and epistemology. Below you'll find some syllabi. Feedback is always welcome. If you're interested in learning more about my courses, please feel free to contact me!
Philosophy 101: Reasoning
This course is intended for our 1st year students. It familiarizes them with basic inductive and deductive argument patterns as well as with common fallacies. My approach focuses on offering students step-by-step guides to analyzing others' arguments and building their own. I place a heavy emphasis on putting arguments into deductive patterns in order to make assumptions more apparent.
Philosophy 101, Community Engaged Learning: Reasoning
This course has all the same learning goals as Philosophy 101, but in this section my undergrads go to a local middle school on a weekly basis to do philosophy with the students there. The aim for undergrads is for them to get better at philosophical thinking through having to model it with younger adolescents; the hope for the middle-schoolers is that they get a taste for philosophy and develop some interest in it. Some studies suggest that studying philosophy helps with math and reading scores. That's good, but even if all students got better at was thinking about philosophy, I'd take that as a win.
Philosophy 441: Symbolic Logic
Your basic course in logic. We use Richard Jeffrey's Formal Logic: Its Scope and Limits and I supplement with Smullyan's First-Order Logic. In Jeffrey's text, we typically get up to the chapter on incompleteness proofs by the end of the semester. From Smullyan, we use proofs of compactness and his presentation of truth sets and Hintikka sets. It's a class that's taken by students from all over the university, so the aim is to make it challenging for both the math and phil majors as well as the finance and sociology majors. To that end, I have them research concepts of elegance in math and logic, culminating in a paper where they have to think about the reduction of their majors to math.
Philosophy 448: Philosophy of Mind
This is more intro to philosophy of cog sci or maybe phil of psych than a traditional phil of mind course. The aim is for students to have some tools for thinking about the nature of mind in a scientifically informed way. After some historical background, we look at issues in AI, language, and the mind-world interface.
Philosophy 491/Psychology 491: The Philosophy and Psychology of Encultured Minds
I'm co-teaching this class with my friend and colleague Vinai Norasakkunkit. He'll cover a host of empirical findings and theories about encultured minds. I'll discuss the metaphysical and epistemological underpinnings and implications of the research.
Philosophy 101: Reasoning
This course is intended for our 1st year students. It familiarizes them with basic inductive and deductive argument patterns as well as with common fallacies. My approach focuses on offering students step-by-step guides to analyzing others' arguments and building their own. I place a heavy emphasis on putting arguments into deductive patterns in order to make assumptions more apparent.
Philosophy 101, Community Engaged Learning: Reasoning
This course has all the same learning goals as Philosophy 101, but in this section my undergrads go to a local middle school on a weekly basis to do philosophy with the students there. The aim for undergrads is for them to get better at philosophical thinking through having to model it with younger adolescents; the hope for the middle-schoolers is that they get a taste for philosophy and develop some interest in it. Some studies suggest that studying philosophy helps with math and reading scores. That's good, but even if all students got better at was thinking about philosophy, I'd take that as a win.
Philosophy 441: Symbolic Logic
Your basic course in logic. We use Richard Jeffrey's Formal Logic: Its Scope and Limits and I supplement with Smullyan's First-Order Logic. In Jeffrey's text, we typically get up to the chapter on incompleteness proofs by the end of the semester. From Smullyan, we use proofs of compactness and his presentation of truth sets and Hintikka sets. It's a class that's taken by students from all over the university, so the aim is to make it challenging for both the math and phil majors as well as the finance and sociology majors. To that end, I have them research concepts of elegance in math and logic, culminating in a paper where they have to think about the reduction of their majors to math.
Philosophy 448: Philosophy of Mind
This is more intro to philosophy of cog sci or maybe phil of psych than a traditional phil of mind course. The aim is for students to have some tools for thinking about the nature of mind in a scientifically informed way. After some historical background, we look at issues in AI, language, and the mind-world interface.
Philosophy 491/Psychology 491: The Philosophy and Psychology of Encultured Minds
I'm co-teaching this class with my friend and colleague Vinai Norasakkunkit. He'll cover a host of empirical findings and theories about encultured minds. I'll discuss the metaphysical and epistemological underpinnings and implications of the research.
